Hashcat64.exe not valid win32 app

[stubby]

I have been using hashcat 3.30 in cmd window on win 7 64 bit OS for the last 5 days to work on a 10 bit
wpa hash.
I have done a few checkpoints and restores in the 5 days, but today after I entered the restore command
 I get a window warning "hashcat64.exe is not a valid win32 application". I rebooted - still
the same. Windows downloaded a windows defender update during the 5 days KB915597. I can't unistall
the KB without re-installing windows. Restores all fail probably because the KB cannot be uninstalled.
Anyone got a suggestion?

[rico]

Ya know, that actually sounds familiar to me. I'm fairly sure this happened to me a while back too - never did figure out what went wrong with my setup but reinstalling hashcat fixed it. Make sure to back up your .restore file if deleting the hashcat folder. And the .hccapx file too if it's even in there.

[atom]

typical problem when people do something like by accident: hashcat64 thishash.txt -m0 -w 3 -a3 -o "hashcat64.exe" ?a?a?a?a

[philsmd]

Yeah, that's actually a very common mistake of new command line users.

I also saw these 2 a lot (Warning: do NOT use these command, they destroy your binaries!!!):
1. use file redirect instead of pipe: "princeprocessor ... > hashcat64.exe -m 0 hash.txt"
2. copy-pasted folder paths "C:\Users\Jeff\> hashcat64.exe -m 0"

in both cases the binaries (in this case hashcat64.exe was overridden) and the user claimed that it was a hashcat bug.